Scandal

Ruthless with Scissors

Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs's memoir of a shattered childhood, has spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list, spawned a Hollywood movie, and earned him literary stardom. It has also drawn a lawsuit from the Turcotte family, with whom he lived, and who are challenging the truth of his brutal, shocking portrait of them.

Augusten Burroughs, photographed with his French bulldogs, Bentley and the Cow, in his home office in Amherst, Massachusetts. Photographs by Jonas Karlsson.

In the summer of 2002, when Theresa Turcotte found out that Augusten Burroughs had written a book that was already a best-seller, she was happy for him.

They had grown up together as teenagers in western Massachusetts, in the 1970s and 80s, and Burroughs had spent a great deal of time at her family's house. It was no secret, to either Theresa or her family, that parts of his childhood had been wrenchingly difficult, that he had been caught in the middle of his parents' volatile marriage and subsequent divorce. She also says she knew of Burroughs's obsession with fame back in those days, so she assumed that the success of the book, a memoir called Running with Scissors, must have made him especially pleased. Critics all over the country were hailing Burroughs as a genius. Carolyn See, writing in The Washington Post, suggested that his book might well be the best modern memoir ever, and it hit the New York Times best-seller list shortly after it was published.

Her curiosity piqued, she went in search of the book on the Internet. It was then that she got her first inkling that it contained enormous amounts of information about her family. She would ultimately discover that her parents, herself, and her four sisters and one brother, renamed the Finches, were actually a major focus of the book. And, she says, Burroughs had never told her he was writing it, despite his phone calls to her in the late 1990s.

She went to a bookstore in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she lives, to buy a copy of Running with Scissors. As she thumbed through it, she could feel her anxiety heighten. But because she still had obligations that day at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she works as a public-health practitioner, it wasn't until that night at home that she began to read it.

The character based on Theresa is named Natalie, and in her first appearance she is described as a "ratty" 13-year-old. In the next reference she has "long, greasy stringy hair and dirty clothes." In the next five pages she is described "spilling crumbs down the front of her striped halter-top" from a tube of Pringles and wiping "her hands on her bare knees" and using the word "cunt."

As she continued to read, Theresa says, she found it difficult to fathom the book's malice toward her and her family. It was filled with things that she believed were categorically false or had been wildly embellished. She also could not believe that Burroughs had revealed details about events in her life that had occurred 20 years earlier and had been horribly painful for her—so painful that she had spent years in therapy trying to overcome them and had never told her own daughter about them.

She continued to read that night, occasionally stopping because she simply could not bear to read anymore, she says, only to pick the book up again several minutes later. Sometimes she had to stop to run to the bathroom and vomit. "I have never vomited so much in my life," she says.

And it was only the beginning of what she says she would be forced to grapple with as a result of how Chris Robison, as she had known him before he changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs, had portrayed her in Running with Scissors. Only the beginning of the shame and humiliation and unwanted exposure and helpless outrage and sense of betrayal that, in roughly 35 hours of interviews with Vanity Fair, members of the real family that Burroughs wrote about say they experienced. The story they tell is just as disturbing and shocking as Burroughs's story, perhaps even more so.

In the genre of the growing-up-in-dysfunction memoir, Burroughs's book rises to a new level. The narrator's mother, who has grandiose visions of being the next Anne Sexton, gives him away so she can pursue her own life. He lands in the Addams Family–like household of a bizarre and manipulative Northampton psychiatrist whose wife and children and grandchildren are depicted on page after page as being crude, disgusting, profane, and utterly lacking in rational judgment. Burroughs is quite candid about himself in the book, particularly about his affair as a teenager with a former male patient of the psychiatrist's who was 20 years his senior. To a certain degree, he leavens the utter blackness with quick and clever humor, reflecting the years he spent as a successful advertising copywriter prior to becoming a literary writer. He also shows some tender moments of affection. But by any standard, the portrait of his mother and the Turcotte family is brutal.

During their interviews, members of the Turcotte family cited numerous instances of what they believe to be fabrications or embellishments, including almost all of the sensational scenes that have made Running with Scissors so popular.

It is the fact that these stories are presented as true, which Burroughs has confirmed over and over in interviews, that has made the book so hugely successful. Shocking scene after shocking scene occurs at the "Finch" home: the narrator and two of the psychiatrist's children play with an old electroshock machine kept under the stairs; the psychiatrist's wife munches on dried dog food; his six-year-old grandson defecates under the grand piano to the applause of other children; a yard sale results in the family's simply living outside for the summer; Augusten and Theresa punch a hole in the kitchen ceiling; the psychiatrist has a room in his office called "the Masturbatorium." In addition, there are endless scenes involving filth and squalor and disturbing sex.

What follows is the Turcottes' version of the events Burroughs describes in Running with Scissors. The interviews with Vanity Fair are the first they have ever given. The family has never spoken publicly before.

Four of the Turcotte sisters, from left: Theresa, Barbara, Liese, and Joanne, photographed in the living room of Barbara's home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

All six children of Dr. Rodolph Turcotte were interviewed in person in Boston last September, over the period of a week. Barbara Turcotte Weene, 57, the oldest of the siblings, called Kate in the book, still lives in Northampton and owns a hair salon there. June Turcotte, 56, called Hope, also lives in Northampton and is a personal-care attendant. Joanne, 54, called Anne, lives in Northampton as well, and worked most recently as a researcher in the Psychology Department of the University of Massachusetts. Paul, 53, called Jeff, lives in Somerville and owns a realty firm in Boston. Liese, 45, called Vickie, is a farmer and artist in Leverett, Massachusetts. Theresa, 42, called Natalie, is the youngest. Four of the children graduated from college, and two of those have advanced degrees. Claire Turcotte, their mother, who according to her children suffers from Alzheimer's disease, was not interviewed. Nor was her husband, who died in 2000, before the book was published. The two grandchildren of Dr. and Mrs. Turcotte who were written about in the book were also interviewed, one in person and the other by phone.

The family has filed a lawsuit against Burroughs and the book's publisher, St. Martin's, for invasion of privacy and libel. The suit, filed in the summer of 2005 in Middlesex Superior Court in Massachusetts, charges that Burroughs and St. Martin's intentionally fictionalized the portrait of the family to make the book more sensational and therefore more marketable. The book, says the suit, "falsely portrays" the Turcotte family as an "unhygienic and mentally unstable cult engaged in bizarre, and, at times, criminal activity. In so doing, the author, with the full complicity of the publisher, literally has fabricated events that never happened and manufactured conversations that never occurred." Both Burroughs and St. Martin's, speaking through the publisher's general counsel, Paul Sleven, deny the allegations in the suit and refuse to comment on anything that the family said.

Burroughs claims he has roughly 20 notebooks in which he kept a journal of his experiences between the ages of 12 and 17 that back up his story, and he says he has continued to keep these journals with him. Family members confirm that Burroughs wrote constantly when they knew him. There is also an extensive public record regarding Dr. Turcotte, a highly controversial psychiatrist whose license to practice medicine was stripped in 1986 due to allegations of deeply disturbing behavior. Additionally, there is an author's note at the beginning of the book saying that "the names and other identifying characteristics of the persons included in this memoir have been changed."

Running with Scissors launched Burroughs into the literary stratosphere. Since it was published, he has become one of the country's most commercially successful memoirists, with three other best-selling titles to his credit: Dry, Magical Thinking, and Possible Side Effects. His books have been published in more than 25 countries, and his aggregate sales certainly reach into the millions. A major Hollywood film version of Running with Scissors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Annette Bening, and Alec Baldwin, was released in October, and the book has remained on the New York Times paperback best-seller list for more than two years. Readers all over the world have been both moved and inspired by him.

During an interview with Vanity Fair last March, Burroughs stood by the veracity of the book, just as he stood by the right of every individual in a free society to tell his story. "This is my story," he said. "It's not my mother's story and it's not the family's story, and they may remember things differently and they may choose to not remember certain things, but I will never forget what happened to me, ever, and I have the scars from it and I wanted to rip those scars off of me."

Theresa Turcotte doesn't dispute Burroughs's right to recount his experiences. "Everybody has a right to write a book about their lives," she says. "It's O.K. He could have written a book about living with our family that I might not have liked, but I wouldn't have hated it. It didn't have to have all that stuff in it … all the sexual stuff, the made-up stuff."

The Turcotte home was hardly perfect, given that the family included six children. Money was frequently an issue, and the house wasn't as fixed-up as it perhaps should have been, but, family members maintain, it didn't sink to the level of dilapidation that Burroughs describes. Her father did go through difficult periods and did make mistakes, Theresa says. She and other family members remember him as compassionate, and some acknowledge that he was controversial and eccentric. But Burroughs, she says, "missed the best part of living with us, which was that we were [a] family. We had our ups and downs, but we cared about each other."

Alleged fabrications and embellishments are a key source of the family's pain. But the issues at stake go far beyond those that became fodder for national debate regarding James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and his famous admission on The Oprah Winfrey Show, in January 2006, that he had in fact changed certain details in his book. The Turcottes' story raises new questions about memoirs in general and the type that Burroughs wrote in particular—what one New York editor calls the "genre of appropriation," in which it's not just the writer's life that's up for grabs but everyone else's as well. The more shocking it is, the more sensational it is, the greater the prospect of fame and fortune. This kind of memoir occupies an uncertain perch between candor and cruelty, sincerity and sensation, and raises the issue of whether the memoirist is obligated to let his subjects know that he is writing about them.

Turcotte family members say that Burroughs never informed them of this, as is the habit of some of the country's leading memoirists. They say none of them knew about the book until it was already a best-seller and reviews were already calling Burroughs a genius and a hero while condemning them for the foulness they, along with their parents and Burroughs's mother, had allowed him to rot in until he somehow escaped. "It was like someone robbing you," says Barbara, the eldest, echoing the feelings of her siblings.

The Turcottes say the betrayal they felt was monumental, given that in their estimation they had opened up their hearts to Burroughs in the 1970s and 1980s when he was lonely and afraid and suicidal, had loved him, had seen the seed of something brilliant in him, had laughed at the stories that came from his vivid imagination and his propensity to exaggerate, had given him money, and had provided him with the sense of connection that Burroughs himself, in a letter to a family member, had said he hungered for, only to read about themselves years later—in a book they say they knew nothing about—portrayed in a way they felt was cruel and remarkably malicious and false in close to two dozen instances.

Both during interviews and in the lawsuit, members of the Turcotte family challenge a cornerstone of the book: the amount of time Burroughs lived in the house and the circumstances under which he came to be there. The chronology of the book is extremely hard to follow, as there are few specific dates. But a synopsis on the back cover states that Burroughs started living at the house at the age of 12 (born in 1965, he turned 12 in 1977), when his mother gave him away to Dr. Turcotte. The book suggests that Burroughs lived primarily there until he was about 17. According to the family, Burroughs had a room in the house for roughly a year and a half, beginning in 1980, when he was 15. Even during that period, says the family, he was going back and forth between the Turcotte home in Northampton and his mother's apartment in Amherst. In addition, the family said that Burroughs's mother assigned guardianship to Dr. Turcotte so that Burroughs could attend public school in Northampton.

‘It was just so devastating for me," says June, who plays a large role in the book. "I just didn't see it coming. Why would he humiliate me in that way, and my family? Why would he target us and say that we were harmful to him?

"I never would have caused that kid any harm, just never would harm him in any way. Every time he was in trouble and I was asked to help, I helped. I did my best to make sure that he was never humiliated, and he was shaky a lot of the time. His parents went through a lot … and he told his mother that I was the only person he trusted," June continues. "Why would you do that to the only person you trusted?"

Theresa may be wondering the same thing. In a public appearance before 300 people at the Hilbert Circle Theatre, in Indianapolis, in October, Burroughs fielded a question from the audience about whether he had maintained any contact with the family. Burroughs, who is now 41, answered that the only person he had kept up with for any period of time was Natalie (Theresa), and that they had spoken "a few times" when he was in his 20s.

But, according to Theresa, they spoke after that. In the mid-1990s, after an invitation from Burroughs, she and her daughter visited him in New York, where, as she remembers it, he went on and on about what a wonderful person she was, what a kind person she was, how she had gotten it together, how she had gone to Smith, how she had had a wonderful child. She says she also got phone calls from him subsequent to that, sometimes when he was sober but more often when he was drunk. According to Theresa, she listened to him say that he wanted to move into her house and live in the basement. She heard him say that he wanted to marry her and have a child with her, an assertion that she herself found improbable, given that he was openly gay. Because of her work in the field of mental health, she knew that his attempts to remain sober were real (Burroughs wrote of that battle in the memoir Dry), and at one point she says she called up various sobriety centers in New York that might take him.

She and Burroughs talked about many things, she says: her life, what other members of the family were up to, events in the past—things that friends freely communicate to each other. But when she read the book that first time, she says, it became horrifyingly clear that Burroughs had taken details from those conversations, twisted them, and put them into the book without telling her that he was writing about her family.

"Nothing is worse than telling somebody something about your family and then having that come back in the most grotesque [way]," says Theresa. "He did not call me up and say, 'Theresa, I'm interviewing you because I'm writing a book about when we were adolescents and I want to let you know.'"

Looking back on what she said to him, she believes she may have even given him the title for the book. In talking about her job, she remembers, she had told him about a community health project that involved making a massive quilt. Some of the teenagers charged with cutting out the drawings for the quilt "were running around with scissors," she says she had told him, and she recalls how Burroughs had said, "Wait a minute," clearly captivated by the phrase. In the book, Burroughs says the phrase himself as a teenager.

June Turcotte was the first of the children to get to know Burroughs. During the 1970s, as his parents' marriage became more and more difficult, he came to spend increasing periods of time at the Turcotte home. June says she found herself drawn to him. "I liked him," she says. "I thought he was a really, really bright kid. He was amazing. He was writing at a young age and he was just really quick-witted, and I thought he was an amazing kid and I cared about him at the time."

Around 1979, she says, with Burroughs's father no longer living at home, it was clear that Burroughs was suffering terribly. She says that her father had asked Burroughs where he might like to temporarily go, perhaps to his grandparents'. "There was concern that he might do harm to himself," she says. "He was really shaky." She says the only place he would feel safe was a hotel in nearby Springfield. On instructions from her father, June says, she accompanied Burroughs to the hotel and spent two weeks there with him, following him around, listening to him, going to as many as two films a day with him, trying to keep him occupied. On another occasion, after Burroughs's father refused to help him financially, says June, she personally borrowed $500 from a friend and gave it to Burroughs so he could have some spending money.

June, who was in her 20s and 30s during the time frame of Running with Scissors, was portrayed by Burroughs as ditzy and strange, an adult with the decision-making capabilities of a child. He quoted her using the word "cunt," although family members say they don't remember June ever using such a word. (According to interviews, as well as a letter that Burroughs wrote as a teenager, which was provided by the family, it was he who routinely used the word.) He wrote that she had carried around a box of Valium in the trunk of her car, and he clearly implied that she called in a bomb threat to Amtrak to prevent a train carrying Burroughs's older lover from leaving. That portrayal was both false and enormously painful, she says, given that she had treated him like a younger brother. "He had an obligation to me as a person," she says. "He told me on the phone in the 1990s that I had saved his life. He said, 'I would have died without you.' And I believe he would have."

And she wasn't the only one to think that. "Thank you, June, for all the loving attention you gave to Chris when I was too sick to be an adequate mother for him," wrote Margaret Robison to June in November of 2002, after the book was published. "I will be forever grateful to you."

There are no rules about what the memoirist is obligated to tell his subjects. But in William Zinsser's book Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, a compilation of essays by some of the country's leading memoirists, the writer's moral obligation to let subjects know what he is writing is taken very seriously. When Jill Ker Conway wrote The Road from Coorain and True North, based on her experiences growing up in Australia and coming to New York, she made it a point to send pertinent pages to those impacted. "I think it's an invasion of privacy not to," she wrote. "If you're going to see yourself in print you deserve a chance to correct anything that may be wrong." Annie Dillard echoes this in her essay: "I don't believe in a writer's kicking around people who don't have access to a printing press. They can't defend themselves."

Burroughs and his publisher did what is often done in potentially controversial memoirs to avoid issues of invasion of privacy—they changed the names and other identifying characteristics. But the attempt to disguise them is haphazard at best. Most editions state that the family resides in Northampton, in Massachusetts. Smith College, which is in Northampton, is mentioned throughout the book. The name of the Turcottes' street is not given, but street names in their neighborhood are specified. So are characteristics that make it easy to identify Dr. Turcotte, given his notoriety in the community, including the fact that he wore a Santa Claus hat and had lost his license to practice medicine. Family members cited instances of people identifying them as the "Finch" family.

It was so easy to figure out who the Finches were that Burroughs himself, in a 2003 interview with the online publication Bookslut, essentially told reporters how to do it. "The doctor was notorious in that area, absolutely notorious, so I always felt it was laziness on the part of reporters to question [the veracity]," he was quoted as saying. "All you have to do is search western Massachusetts doctors in the '70s, in North Hampton [sic]—how many psychiatrists were there—and you can access a lot of stories, lots and lots of stories." In September of 2002, the real name of the family was used in a People magazine profile of Burroughs. When I interviewed Burroughs, he said that he had not given People the name and has never revealed it publicly.

When I asked Burroughs if he wished in hindsight that he had done a better job of disguising the identities of the family, he said, "No. I think I did a good job of disguising them. I didn't out them. I didn't out them. I didn't reveal their names to the press."

Instead, he said, it was the family that made itself public by filing the lawsuit and attaching real names to the pseudonyms that he had used.

"But the world knew before," I pointed out.

"No," he said emphatically.

"People magazine. Didn't they mention the name Turcotte?"

"They did," he then acknowledged. "They didn't respect. They didn't respect the efforts that I made to conceal their identities. It was surprising."

What upset Theresa so terribly, she says, what contributed to months of nausea and overwhelming anxiety and repeated trips to the emergency room, not to mention an inability to work and hours of psychotherapy, was the book's revelation that she had been the key witness in a statutory-rape case. As a young teenager she had entered into a relationship with a man 21 years her senior, who became her legal guardian. He was convicted of statutory rape in 1982.

Burroughs knew how difficult that period had been for her, she says. Every day, he had waited for her outside the courtroom, and he was the only one she talked to about the ordeal, how exhausted and afraid she was. "I really loved him and he helped me a lot," she says. "At least I felt that way."

She says she spent years in therapy working to move beyond what had happened. She subsequently graduated from Smith, got her master's degree, found a job she liked, and developed a close-knit circle of friends. But, she says, she had never told her own daughter, Emerald, about the episode.

The references to what happened are roughly a page in the book. Certain details, she says, were twisted. But the outline is still there, in black and white. "It really devastated me to see it in print," she says. "It was really hard … extremely hard. Extremely, extremely, extremely hard," she says, becoming visibly upset. In the past few years, as she has tried to cope with what has been written about her, she has said to herself "over and over again, This is not about you. This is not about you. This is definitely not about you. Because this is not about me. It's just not about me. I wish that you could just step back in history and see who I was back then. It's not me. It just wasn't my family and it wasn't me."

Barbara Turcotte Weene says she avoided reading the book because she could see what it was doing in particular to June and Theresa, emotionally tearing them apart and, in the case of Theresa, inflicting physical damage as well. On two occasions, Theresa says, she went to the emergency room of the Baystate Medical Center because of overwhelming anxiety and nausea, only to be sent home. She says she then went to a hospital emergency room a third time, on this occasion Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, after repeatedly vomiting. According to her account, she begged medical personnel to give her Xanax and was transferred to the psychiatric ward of Holyoke hospital. When she woke up the next day a doctor, after examining her, said that there might actually be something physically wrong with her. She had emergency gallbladder surgery later that day, and Weene believes that her sister's physical suffering was related to her psychological reaction to the book.

"I thought there was something toxic about [the book] and I did not want to be upset.… I could tell my sisters were in a lot of pain and I thought that it was taking up a lot of their lives and I wanted to stay above it and I was hoping it would go away," says Weene. But in 2004, after hearing from family members that a film version of the book was in development, and reading about it herself online, she knew that the book was not going to go away.

At first, as she read it, she said, she found it light and funny, if also sick and false, with its now famous references to Dr. Turcotte's Masturbatorium (the family believes that Burroughs may have created this from the fact that Dr. Turcotte maintained what he called the Institute for the Advancement of Maturation) and the scene in which Theresa and Liese invite the young Burroughs to play with an old electroshock machine that is kept under the stairs of the Turcotte house. In interviews, the six Turcotte children stated that it was not an electroshock machine that was kept under the stairs but, rather, an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner that was missing a wheel.

Weene herself is a minor character in the book. She wasn't living in the house when the events in the book took place. The description of her is barely a page, but compliments Burroughs pays ("She was slim, sophisticated and listened to Laura Nyro and fusion jazz") are almost immediately countered by his writing that other family members thought she was a "stuck-up cunt." Burroughs writes that Weene dated black men and kept "African fertility icons" in her apartment. The objects Burroughs referred to were not African fertility icons but gifts given to her from all over the world, says Weene, including a musical instrument. To prove her point, she brought them into a class on the memoir at the University of Massachusetts, after being invited to speak on the impact of Running with Scissors, and showed them to the students. She says when she told them these were the "African fertility icons" she believes Burroughs had referred to, they were dumbfounded.

Weene was upset by the reference, but she could handle it. What she could not handle, what nauseated her and prevented her from getting out of bed for two days, was the reference to the statutory-rape trial and the characterization of her daughter, Rebekah. Burroughs states that, after leaving Northampton, Rebekah became a massage therapist, "who gave hand jobs." Both Weene and Rebekah said emphatically during interviews that the characterization was false.

"I was, like, a little girl who was his friend [at the time of the book]. I had never been unkind to him in any way," says Rebekah in a phone interview from California, where she is a licensed massage therapist. "I just didn't understand. And then I read the part about my cousin and I did understand. Because I thought, O.K. He's on an all-out attack and he's going to take two little children and attack them and make it as disgusting as possible, and that's when it sort of hit me that we were being attacked."

Her cousin John Turcotte was called Poo Bear in the book, a seemingly intentional scatological reference. He did have such a nickname as an infant, say family members, but it was spelled "Pooh Bear," based on A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books, and three different captioned photos and cards supplied by the family clearly identified him as "Pooh Bear."

Burroughs describes John Turcotte, about six years old, running into a room of the house naked, with his penis jiggling and the odor of his feet so strong that Burroughs could smell it from across the room. He squats beneath the grand piano in the living room, "shitting," says, "Poo can poo," as if he were still a toddler, then lifts his finger to his nose so he can sniff it.

Theresa and Liese, who according to the book witnessed the defecation incident, say that it did not happen. Married with three children, John Turcotte says he has been unable to ever discuss the book with his wife because of the pain it has caused him. He was a police officer at the time the book came out, and he says the description was so devastating to him that he quit the force for fear that members of the department would read it and make the link to him. "I imagined that everybody was thinking … that somehow I was carrying a sign around my neck [that said], 'Look at me, everybody, I'm Poo Bear.'"

When I interviewed Burroughs in March, it was understood that he likely could not comment on the lawsuit, because it was pending. There were two reasons for the interview. The first was Burroughs's new book, a collection of personal essays called Possible Side Effects. The second was the cloud that Burroughs had come under as a result of the controversy over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and Frey's admission of fabrications. In the aftermath of the Frey incident, St. Martin's had sent out advance copies of Burroughs's new book for reviewers with a disclaimer that read, "Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well."

"It looks like I was scared shitless or my publisher was," said Burroughs of the disclaimer, but he indicated that it had already been in the works before the Frey controversy, and he correctly pointed out that all of his nonfiction books carry disclaimers. He did not seem concerned that the Frey incident would affect him: "I just don't believe that there's a huge percentage of memoirists and nonfiction writers in general out there who are deliberately lying and inventing huge elaborate tales. I just don't believe it."

When I did ask questions about the lawsuit, Burroughs addressed at least some of them. After interviewing members of the Turcotte family in September, I made repeated requests to interview Burroughs again, and contacted representatives at St. Martin's as well. Both Burroughs and St. Martin's were informed that the family had been interviewed. The requests were turned down, citing the pending litigation.

"Mr. Burroughs and St. Martin's both deny the allegations asserted in the lawsuit," Paul Sleven, the general counsel of St. Martin's, wrote in an e-mail. "Our decision not to comment … does not mean that we or Mr. Burroughs agree that any of what the Turcottes may have told you is accurate."

Neither the Turcotte family nor the lawyers representing them, Howard M. Cooper and Tyler Chapman, of the Boston firm Todd & Weld L.L.P., have seen Burroughs's journals. A request by letter to Burroughs from Vanity Fair, urging him to produce the journals, was never responded to. One small piece of his writing kept by the family may shed some light on the nature and tone of what was in them: "Sometimes I just want to sit in my very own world and think of the naughtiest of things with no one to tell me what not to think about. My own world is very important to me. I need it but too much is dangerous. I guess I sit in my own world so much because the surgeon general has determined that this world is dangerous to my health."

There is no doubt that Dr. Turcotte was a troublesome presence in Northampton until his death, in 2000. He had distinct notions about psychiatry, including allowing patients to live in the Turcotte house at times. He also had distinct notions about the free will of children, the right of young adolescents to make their own choices. And with a wife and six children and an old house in Northampton, he had financial problems. His license to practice medicine was revoked by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine for "gross misconduct," which included allowing a male patient, Jonathan Frey, to assume guardianship of Theresa when she was 13; not becoming properly suspicious after there was abundant evidence that they had been having sexual relations; and soliciting money from Frey in the form of requests for "loans." (It was Frey who was convicted, in 1982, of the statutory rape of Theresa.)

John Robison, Burroughs's older brother, has been a vigorous advocate for him, attesting to the truth of what Burroughs has written. In an interview with The Boston Globe last March, Robison said that he had witnessed some of the more sensational scenes described in the book, such as Dr. Turcotte's examining his own feces; his wife's eating dried dog food; the placement of the living-room furniture in the front yard; and the predatory behavior of the former patient of Dr. Turcotte's who, according to the book, had an affair with Burroughs. "Anyone who reads the available public record about Turcotte will conclude that my brother's book is eminently believable," Robison told the Globe.

Because of the constraints Burroughs said he was under, I limited my questions about the alleged fabrications. But I did ask him about a famous scene in the book the family has asserted is false, in which he and Theresa, bored and not liking the low ceiling in the Turcotte home, spontaneously decide to take it down.

"And you have proof, right? Is it in your journals?"

"Um … yeah, that's something that can be proved."

"Through the journals?"

"Look at the ceiling. Just look at it."

The ceiling of the kitchen of the Turcotte home was indeed removed while Burroughs lived there, exposing the original vaulted beams. The work was done as part of a remodeling of the kitchen by someone living in the home who had carpentry experience, Theresa said. "Chris and I never tore down that ceiling. That's the plain, simple fact," she says. "We never did."

I also asked Burroughs about another pivotal moment in Running with Scissors—when his mother allowed Dr. Turcotte to become his legal guardian. It is a crucial point in the book that his mother signed over guardianship of him to her psychiatrist because of her struggle to find herself both creatively and personally. The act was seized on by reviewers as one of almost monstrous selfishness—a mother giving her child away.

The family's suit says Dr. Turcotte's guardianship had to do with schooling issues. And Burroughs conceded during our interview that a change in schooling from Amherst to Northampton was "one of the reasons," although it was never specifically cited as a reason in the book. "That was one of the reasons, you know, that would enable me to hopefully go to a Northampton school.… But the truth is my mother could not raise me and she believed that when you were 13 you were a free person and you were an adult."

But the documents provided by the family show that Dr. Turcotte was appointed Burroughs's guardian on October 6, 1980, by the Hampshire County Probate Court in Northampton, which would have made him 17 days short of 15. Documents also show that Burroughs's mother, along with Dr. Turcotte, was present several months later for a conference with Northampton school officials to discuss her son's chronic absenteeism.

Prior to the establishment of the guardianship, Burroughs spent time at the Turcotte home, in part, says June, because "he loved it. He absolutely loved it. He begged to come over. He wanted to come over. He asked to come over." He stayed for a few days or sometimes a week, say family members. Barbara Weene also says that Burroughs's mother "wasn't just dropping him off because she wanted to go write and have a la-di-da time. She was in the middle of a horrendous divorce. Her whole life was coming apart."

The Turcottes say their decision to file suit was not an easy one. Countless hours were spent discussing the book and what to do—there was the hope that it would just go away, as well as the futility of legally taking on a major New York publisher with deep pockets. Tears were shed. Arguments ensued. Christmas celebrations got sucked dry by endless deliberations about the book that had come to consume their lives. "If you're Clint Eastwood or Barbra Streisand or somebody else, you can just intimidate the shit out of [a publisher]," says Theresa. "But when you're us, what are we going to do … go over and say, 'You know, you hurt our feelings. You wrecked our life'? So? So what? It doesn't matter to them."

There was also the "cruel irony," as lawyer Tyler Chapman put it, that, in filing suit, they would be going public, confirming that they were indeed the Finches. The tipping point for the family came in 2005 when it became clear that a film version of Running with Scissors was going to be made, with a star-studded cast and the potential for a far wider audience than the book's. (The movie, which opened in wide release on October 27 and received generally abysmal reviews, turned out to be a box-office bomb, making less than $6.5 million so far. It has, on the other hand, boosted sales of the book enormously.)

The suit was filed in June of 2005, shortly before the state's three-year statute of limitations for defamation took effect. The producer of the film, Sony Pictures Entertainment, was not named. Instead, an out-of-court settlement was reached between the Turcotte family and the producer prior to the film's release. The terms of the settlement are not public. The film does contain numerous scenes that closely resemble those in the book. Like the book, it uses the name Finch. But, unlike the book, the film makes no mention of Massachusetts or Northampton.

Burroughs said he was "dumbfounded" and "incredulous" when he read the suit. "You've got to be kidding me" was his reaction. "I couldn't believe it."

"It is very painful," he said, his voice dropping, as if he too had been betrayed. "And it's also painful to have your childhood questioned, to have the experiences you went through, you talk about, questioned."

He used a tellingly dramatic anecdote to explain his feelings. "I used to have nightmares all through my 20s and 30s that I was in the [Turcotte] house again, in the TV room, but no one else was there—they were in the next rooms. [I] felt the worst panic that I have to get out of here. [I'd] wake up and I'd be like, 'Ah, it was just a dream.' And then they went away after I wrote the book. Now they're back.

"[The suit] felt like 'Oh no. When am I going to get away from this family? When am I going to be able to get away from this childhood? When can I get out of the house?'"

It was a remarkable statement, given that it was Burroughs who chose to make his personal history public by writing Running with Scissors, not the family. Just as remarkable as when he looked at me with utter sincerity and said this of the family he had written about: "I hoped that they would recognize themselves and love it," he said. "I hoped [Theresa] most of all would love it." Then, once again came the low and wistful tone, the aggrieved memoirist: "But that's not what happened."